View full sizeJody Somers/For The Star-LedgerNew Rutgers University President Robert L. Barchi speaks in August at his office in New Brunswick.

NEW BRUNSWICK — Three weeks into his new job, Rutgers University President Robert Barchi announced a shake-up of the state university’s management structure today.

Rutgers will begin nationwide searches to fill several top jobs, including a newly created chief financial officer post and other positions related to the school’s impending merger with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

"We have a huge change in the scope of the institution," Barchi said in an address to the Rutgers University Senate in New Brunswick. "We are talking about expanding the financial scope of the university from somewhere north of $2.3 billion to over $3 billion ... nearly doubling the complexity of the organization."

Rutgers is scheduled to take over most of UMDNJ, including two medical schools, under legislation signed last month by Gov. Chris Christie. Though Rutgers’ two governing boards are not scheduled to vote to finalize the move until November, Barchi said the university must start looking for people to fill top management positions in anticipation of the July 1 merger.

A nationwide search will begin immediately for someone with an expertise in managing the finances of medical organizations to act as Rutgers’ chief financial officer in a newly created senior vice president for finance post. The new financial officer will oversee Rutgers’ expanded budget.

"We need to be crisper," Barchi said. "We need to be more responsive and more direct in our financial management and reporting."

Similar nationwide searches will be launched to find a new chancellor for Rutgers-Newark and a chancellor for biomedical and health sciences.

Much of the structure of Rutgers’ new management system was created by lawmakers in Trenton this spring during frenzied closed-door negotiations over the merger legislation. The creation of several new chancellor and provost positions were added to the legislation to answer criticism that Rutgers’ Newark and Camden campuses have been underfunded by the New Brunswick-based administration for decades.

Under the new management structure, chancellors with equal authority will head the New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses. A fourth chancellor will head the biomedical and health sciences schools acquired from UMDNJ. All will report directly to the Rutgers president.

Each chancellor will also have a provost to help oversee academic matters on their campuses. The health sciences chancellor will have two provosts, one in Newark and one in New Brunswick. Barchi said Rutgers will not launch costly national searches to find candidates for the five provost jobs. Instead, the provosts will be selected from among current faculty members.

It remains unclear how much the Rutgers-UMDNJ merger will cost or how the university will pay for the new management positions. A team of consultants is studying the financial implications of the restructuring.

Barchi also announced today that Richard Edwards, who served as Rutgers’ interim president over the summer, will be the university’s top academic administrator. Edwards, 69, had been serving as the interim executive vice president for academic affairs for more than a year.

Now that the "interim" has been dropped from his title, Edwards salary will be $385,000 a year. But 10 percent of his salary will be "at risk" if he does not meet certain goals under a new salary structure Barchi is instituting for top executives, a campus spokeswoman said.